


Builders' Tea

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Life-long Love, Low-key, M/M, turning point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-21 04:39:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4815383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a couple of things. It's a bit of an attempt to give a LITTLE more of one "first meeting" I gave for Greg and Mycroft that left them clinging to each other in the rain, surrounded by felled attackers. THis is not all that much more graphic, but somewhat. </p><p>It's another of my ongoing approaches to the question of Mystrade occurring between two men who are being written while avoiding many of the high-romance tropes. They're still romantic, but I've tried to keep the power of the romance reined in and the energy quiet and dry, </p><p>I'm also intrigued by how people could move from one relationship paradigm to another. In this case it was smooth as custard and just as sweet. Hope you all like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Builders' Tea

So many possible turning points. So many first times, first embraces, first moments of love…or hate. In the end, the mystery is to see in and in, until you see some hint of what might cause two such men to change—to turn to each other, rather than proceed, side by side, unwavering in their isolation.

They are not young. It’s easy to imagine love’s sweeping changes coming to the young. They chase after love so fast they often overtake it and find themselves outpacing romance. Cupid is left fumbling for his arrows and swearing as Venus hitches up her skirts and breaks into an undivine sprint.  Similarly there are middle-aged and even antique votaries of the cult of love—those who display chest-hair and sagging breasts, round tummies wrapped too tightly in rayon-spandex blend leopard skin and stretch denim. Be kind—someone has to keep the people selling chemical inspiration in business, after all.

But these two? It’s a challenge to imagine them jumping the track. They’re such sensible men—the anchor lines, the corner stones of friends, of families, of subordinates, even of cities and nations. They’re the men we all want to imagine are clinging firm to the tiller of our civilization, keeping our aim straight and true while we, never such secure navigators ourselves, show willing by “keeping out of the way” and going through the rum at a vigorous clip.

“God forbid they let me at the helm,” we think, and pour another jigger of booze into the lime and the coconut and drink it all up.

So, Mycroft and Lestrade: the poor bastards left to steer reality through the difficult currents and straits while the rest of us run off doing what we think we are good at, even if it’s Sherlock racing around muddling the chain of evidence and John playing vigilante sniper. We can afford these little indulgences, in part because we can trust the men at the wheel.

What do we see when we look at them? No—no, a better question. What do they see when they see each other? They’re both bright men, and if Lestrade can’t match Mycroft for pure scope and brilliance of deduction, he trounces the other man with both intuition and street experience the genius lacks. Both have the training and background to look with wiser eyes than most.

What do they see?

Mycoft, for example: what does he see looking at Lestrade?

Fifty-one, fit, divorced almost four years, now. Left home at a young age, toured with a band, never made it far. By his early twenties he’d reconsidered his future, and signed on for training with the Met. Made constable. Worked his way through all the training programs they had, and helped invent the new unified system. He aced detective training, muddled through scientific training, and did better than anyone expected at analytic training, which is what got him messed up with nasty old espionage agencies—and nasty younger espionage whiz-kids.

Mycroft, watching Lestrade over a drab café table, hides a smile, remembering the man’s first interaction with the two Holmes brothers.  They’d been in one of the dead zones around the Port of London, surrounded by old warehouses in transition from one set of uses to another—the “other” being both criminal and political, and involving things that went “bang” and “pow.” Lestrade had been drawn there by one set of rumors—drug-related killings among the gangs, and a disturbing rumor of weapons being distributed to idiots who should have known better. Mycroft and his half-trained pup of a brother had been brought for a rendezvous with an arms dealer. Or that’s what they’d been told.

It had gone quite excitingly pear-shaped for a little while after the Holmeses had arrived. The rain, of course, but Mycroft secretly felt that counting rain in England was like trying to beg sympathy for sand in Egypt: rain was just one of the obstacles that went with the course. Guns, though, yes. He’d count guns. Also too many people with martial arts training, definitely. A ghastly sense of having been underprepared for the events? Abso-bloody-lutely. Mycroft had fought as hard as he could, all the while hearing his mother standing over his grave scolding him for letting his baby brother get hurt. He’d lost track of Sherlock in the dark and the rain and the mist off the river. He couldn’t tell one person from the next. But then he’d seen that unmistakable checker-board square flashing of a constable’s uniform hat, and he’d shouted, “Oi, here—MI6!”

He’d felt the other man move into place at his back. It had felt amazing—like all England had arrived. Like winning the Battle of Britain. Like Dunkirk and the rescue from the beaches of Normandy. Like taking the World Cup after years of seeing it go to Ecuador or Portugal or Kenya. To hell with angels singing in choirs overhead—having Lestrade at his back had felt like hearing the bloody Welsh break out “Cwm Rhondda” in four-part harmony with the bass section well liquored up after a turn-about victory against Scotland. There’d been one bad minute hauling Sherlock’s scrawny body out of the copper’s reach, shouting, “Sorry, sorry, mine, for my sins!” But from that moment on it had been easy running all the way, with the nasty little pillocks falling at their feet until there was no one left but Lestrade and Mycroft—and Sherlock sitting on his heels examining the left nostril-hairs of some would-be dervish and commenting on his hashish habits. And Mycroft and Lestrade had fallen over each other and panted out the adrenaline and muttered to each other about the insane luck of it all.

He’d known then, of course, that the sonofabitch was quite beautiful. Well it wasn’t as though Mycroft was blind, for the love of God. He could think back to those days, superimpose young Lestrade over Lestrade now: Thirty-one over fifty-one. Even in the cold lights of the warehouse district, soaked and shivering in the rain, he’d been a peach. Dark hair and dark eyes showed well, and that flash of perfect teeth in an incandescent grin? Even in memory it could jerk Mycroft’s balls tight remembering that sight, and all the emotions that had run loose that night. Lestrade had been lean and fit, at his physical moment of perfection, poised on the edge of middle-age but not yet arrived at that destination. After that fight he’d sizzled with energy—the mist seemed to hit him and hiss, he was so hot, so alive. He’d thrust out a hand and introduced himself. Mycroft, remembering belatedly that shouting his MI6 affiliation was more than a little not-done, had sighed and muttered that he was Mycroft Holmes, and that the idiot squatting on the pavement was Sherlock, his brother, but that beyond that he was going to have to get permission from his superiors to reveal more.

Lestrade had grinned, and said, “Secret squirrels?”

“Spooks. Boo!” The comment had been the only thing in the vicinity even pretending to be dry…

Then they’d grinned at each other and stepped cautiously back, because the kind of energy that sang between them had only one more option on the menu, and that option led to a bed at the end of the evening—or soon thereafter.

Mycroft had already spotted the wedding ring on the other man’s hand. Why was it that all the good ones were straight or taken?

He’d touched his own ring, and sighed.

The fifty-one-year-old Lestrade is no less beautiful, but he's been marked by time. Dark hair has turned to silver and pewter and blued steel, mottled and dappled like leaf-fall or rain on a smooth pond’s surface. Wrinkles arrived, each giving evidence of the lively mind and kind heart—of tempers hot and intense, but brief. Of laughter. Of clever wit. Of humor. Of grace… His knuckles have just begun to grow knobby—just a faint promise of years to come. His hands are well-kept: he is a detective and an analyst himself, in his own right, not a common laborer. His only calluses are gentleman’s calluses from playing his guitar, not thick armor built up by brute work.

His clothes are plain—but with the occasional sign he might once have dreamed of finer garb. A nice scarf, a shirt open an extra button with no tie, suggesting he knows it shows his throat to good effect. And if his overcoat is more Columbo than Pall Mall, Mycroft has the eyes to look and know that it once promised more snap and style than its fabric and manufacture could have ever actually delivered.

Is that what would first chip a crack into Mycroft’s guarded heart? A moment of sympathy, imagining the other man standing in front of a rack of overcoats in a John Lewis window, wondering if the glamor projected would last longer than the purchase would take to ring up? Knowing it would not, but dreaming anyway? God knows, Mycroft loves his own suits and coats. But, no—the truth is the crack was made that first night, and has never healed over, merely been hid from view. Often so well hid even Mycroft has been able to pretend his affections were untouched.

He looks at Lestrade and sees a real person…someone he knows better than he would easily admit. But twenty years working together, on and off—twenty years of watching him work with Sherlock, hearing of his actions reported through Sherlock’s eyes…

He knows too much, he thinks, as he looks at the other man. He knows of the ill-fated marriage. He knows about the wife who did her best—she honestly did, before she ran out of any real hope. He knows Lestrade did his best, too, unaware that the key problem was that, given a choice between a mystery, or an hour at the pub with his Met team, or an afternoon spent trying to explain the evidentiary standards of the courts to Sherlock one more time—and spending hours sweet-talking his bored wife—he would choose anything but the wife every time, and then feel stunned and blindsided when she finally found her own romance without him.

He knows of the times Lestrade has cheated his own job—cut corners. Turned a blind eye—to Sherlock and John, of course, but sometimes to a murder he thought had needed to be done, and sometimes to a theft that didn’t seem worth the damage a matching arrest would trigger. He knows lies Lestrade has told, and blame he’s handed out to those who never earned it. He knows Lestrade’s a bit too soft on Sherlock. He knows what things Lestrade feels guilty about: he’s read them on his face, in the motion of his hands, in the pain in his eyes. He knows some of the guilt comes from following the rules, rather than from breaking them.

He understands. He’s had to do the wrong thing for the right and legal reasons himself more than once.

He knows Lestrade drinks a little too much—not enough to be in trouble, but it’s something Mycroft has come to watch for reflexively, checking cross-departmental surveillance reports, listening between the lines to what Sherlock passes on, even occasionally sinking to reviewing CCTV footage from Lestrade’s favorite pubs. Not often. Not to the point of being stalker-y. He just…worries.

He’s Mycroft. He worries. It’s his talent and his genius, and he refuses to apologize for it, even if it does occasionally end up with him counting empty pint glasses and trying to guess whether a few straight scotches will follow them when Lestrade gets home.

Mycroft tries to pretend he doesn’t know that Lestrade’s late for his annual physical. He tries to tell himself he doesn’t know about the tenner the man dropped betting on Man U—a bet Mycroft could have told him was never going to bring him in single shiny penny. He tries to tell himself he doesn’t care.

He knows he’s lying to himself. But his life is glued together from fictions—the million lies that allow him to survive at all. Never tell the flying pig it’s aerodynamically unworthy of flight—at least, not till you’ve convinced him to stop fluttering around by the big cloud just east of Big Ben. Some lies are crucial.

“I’m going to get another cuppa,” he says, rising. “You?”

Lestrade looks over the top of his reading glasses and considers, before nodding. “Same as last time,” he says. “The girl knows me.”

Mycroft knows him, too, and could have guessed going in he’d want a builder’s brew-up. He’s got fancier tastes at other times, but not when he’s working, when it’s all “sweet and white and strong as hell, miss.” He smiles and ambles easily to the counter of the café, unaware of Lestrade’s eyes following him.

 

What does Lestrade see? That sensible man? It’s so easy to play him off as common clay against Mycroft’s prim and aristocratic semblance, but that does both men a disservice many times over. Lestrade, though middle-class through and through, is still lace-curtain working class. His people were respectable, if not posh, and for generations they’ve “done well for themselves.” If Sherlock looks taller by means of a good coat and a short friend, Lestrade chooses to look dumber by use of a lad's-lad cheerfulness situated next to the nearest available  smart-mouthed Holmes brother. He realized early on that you could always count on at least one Holmes to swan around sucking the air out of the room and showing off the fully-erect size of his cognitive organ. One such brother was enough to provide a man like Lestrade with plenty of cover for his own deductive efforts. Two were enough to ensure no one would ever look twice at the quiet little man behind the curtain with the forensic team and the warrant to search…

Often the two were so busy being the center-stage attraction that Lestrade was able to study them, knowing their attention was held elsewhere.

Look at Mycroft, for example. He’s worried about something, and feeling pressured in some way. Lestrade’s not sure what triggered it—he was fine an hour ago when they arrived. But in the time since, as they’ve exchanged details of their shared research and filled out forms to allow further digging to occur, Mycroft’s wandered into his worry zone.

Worry zone? Lestrade fights back a small laugh. Mycroft Holmes doesn’t deal with mere zones. He deals with hemispheres. All the hemispheres. All of them…at least where worry is concerned.

The first night they’d met, in the rain and the glaring dark-light chiaroscuro of the warehouse district—even then Mycroft Holmes had been worrying. Lestrade can remember it, and feel the bittersweet ache of the memory.

A tall lad, Mycroft had been. At one of the high peaks of his weight, and not one bit less graceful or limber because of it. Dark hair cut short, and plastered to his skull by the driving rain. He’d been wearing a neat little two-piece suit, less stuffy than the styles he later adopted as age and standing demanded dignity and authority beyond anything Mycroft wanted to bother generating through pure theatrics. Twenty-six years old…

A baby, Lestrade thinks now, watching the other man exchanging rigid, prim pleasantries with the poor barista, who’s making heavy going of it. Poor Mike—always forgetting he’s too literate for his targets, who are often unlikely to follow any pun more highbrow than something with a “tart” in it. Mycroft had been a baby then—and Lestrade, smiling, knows that in some ways he’s still a baby. Always a baby. Nothing has ever stripped the innocence and commitment to lost ideals from the man.

Mycroft had pulled Sherlock away from Lestrade—and vice versa—in the middle of a fight, shouting far too politely that Sherlock was on their team. Lestrade could hear the faint apology in his voice, the motion to put Sherlock between them where he’d be safe, the frustration when Sherlock wormed free and leapt on the nearest Teen-age Mutant Ninja Jihadi with dreams of scimitars and heaven complete with virgins. Then Mycroft had backed up tight to Lestrade—and held his point.

Held it.

It was like a steel rod rising up and drawing the lightning, leaving Lestrade safe. It was like hearing the whoop-whoop-whoop of a police car with the siren running, and the crackle of handheld radios announcing that allies had arrived. Or perhaps, Lestrade thought with a smile, it was like finding yourself in a downpour, only to have Mycroft arrive in the nick of time with his damned brolly.

He’d rescued Lestrade that way more than once. Lestrade had eventually realized Mycroft made a game of it, searching for a chance to sneak up and—POP—and hey-presto, the rain stopped and Lestrade jumped a foot and swore, and Mycroft smiled a prim, controlled little smile, eyes gleaming with laughter.

Yes. That was the feel of that first night, somehow—the laughter. They’d clung together at the end, wet and shaken and shivering and wired with adrenaline, and Lestrade had giggled a high-pitched giggle, like a hyena. He’d felt the other man, taller and a little pudgy, but warm from fighting under the light wool of his jacket. In that second Lestrade had gone hard—the kind of hard you can’t pretend away, prodding Mycroft just under his belt-buckle. For that second both men had gripped tighter, pulled closer, gasped against each other…and then pulled back.

Because one did.

Because Lestrade had remembered his wife at home, and had felt the ring around his finger.

Because he’d seen the gleam of gold on Mycroft’s finger.

Because Sherlock had been there, mere feet away, blathering on about hashish and singed nose-hairs and something about what that meant.

Because you didn’t do that. Not if you were trying to be someone like Lestrade—or Mycroft. He was already in that moment sure that Mycroft was making an effort to be the sort of professional who didn’t shag a total stranger straight off a James Bond battle with evil terrorists.

Standing back he’d seen so much—not a beautiful man, but an easily loved one. The laughing eyes, the beaky nose, the round little stomach, the gawky limbs, the forelock in a soggy question mark over his brows. Wide mouth. Long, expressive hands edging toward goblin-ish tangles of fingers.

Now he watched the forty-six-year-old saunter back with both cups of tea.

“She’s a bit slow.”

“I bet you say that about all the baristas.”

Mycroft crinkled his nose and made a campy little moue of dismissal. “Me? I’m the picture of tolerant enlightenment. But I do know what demerara sugar is. She didn’t need to explain.”

“Ah, logic: she’s slow because she’s dared to think you are.”

Brows flew up. “Of course.”

Lestrade laughed.

They laughed together, he thought. They always had. It had seen them through years of uncertainty. Fear for Sherlock. Hell—fear OF Sherlock! Tragedy. Complications. Missions from hell.

The revelation is sudden, but deep. Sharp and painful—but funny as hell. Lestrade, watching this older Mycroft take his seat on the other side of the table, realizes that even now they are not known to anyone in the world as a working team. Anthea knows of their joint labors—but her world frames Mycroft as the sole, lonely Lord High Holmes, and Lestrade as one of many minions at his beck and call. Sherlock knows, but as usual makes the partnership all about himself: the man Mycroft chose to nip at Sherlock’s heels and keep an eye on baby brother. John barely has a clue.

Lestrade’s superiors at the Met know he works with MI6, and even who he works with—but they have been told little if anything beyond that. The divide between the two agencies provides the Met with far less visibility than MI6 claims.

His wife never knew Mycroft Holmes lived at all.

Given Mycroft was the man who poured Lestrade a three-inch glass of single malt when the two separated, and another of like depth and quality when the divorce was finalized, that seemed ironic. But the poor woman had not had a need to know.

That had been true of almost everything, when Lestrade thought about it. He’d had a life—and she’d never needed to know. He’d never cared for her to know.

“You’re getting morbid,” Mycroft says, tartly, as he fusses with his spoon and napkin and cup of café tea.

“Just looking back.”

“The past is always morbid.”

“Not as morbid as the future,” Lestrade points out, eyes twinkling. “Death devours all lovely things…”

Mycroft narrows his eyes and hisses. “Do not quote at me. It’s unbecoming, and shows signs of reading too many twee mystery novels. The sort set in Oxford in particular.”

“You just hate admitting that, brains or no brains, you’re not much at reeling off quotes.”

“I reserve my Mind Palace for important things.”

“Like all the words of the African Swallow routine in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.”

For a moment Lestrade can see his friend struggling to marshal a retort. Then the eyes—eyes that always did laugh—shimmer and glow. “Guilty, as charged,” he sighs. “What next? A night in lock-up?”

Lestrade shakes his head. “Only times I’ve ever locked you up were times you needed it for a cover,” he points out.

“Why not?” Mycroft snipped, grinning a fox’s wicked grin. “You’ve got a perfectly good jail, after all. And perfectly good handcuffs.”

“Perhaps I was worried you’d let me.”

The air seems to still between them.

Mycroft swallows and studies Lestrade, face suddenly sober. He says, “I’ve never invited you over to mine, have I? Not even for a meeting.”

“No. You haven’t.”

“Nor have you invited me to yours.”

“No.”

Mycroft nodded, eyes now darkening like smoke over blue skies. He looks down at his tea cup….

What he sees isn’t tea. It’s twenty years, and one dear man's body dancing and flowing down a timeline from young to old, with who knew how many years left to spin in space and leave a mark? So beautiful—so precious. So ephemeral. All people die.

He looks at Lestrade. “Losing you will break my heart.”

Lestrade looks back, seeing the laughing lad in the rain, forelock twisted in a question mark asking why… He shrugs. “But you knew that all along. Our hearts have been breaking since the first night.”

Mycroft grimaces, then laughs. “You know the rules—you break it, you own it. Come back to my place, Greg. We’ve got years to make up for, and too little time.”

Lestrade doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t wonder what has just happened. He just nods and smiles, and gathers up his things, and they leave together. All that remains are two paper cups stained dark with café tea.

 

 


End file.
